Erika D. Smith: Resident relives Indiana Ave.'s heyday in new book

Dec. 8, 2012

Kathi Ridley-Merriweather and her father Thomas Howard Ridley Jr. sit in the seats at the Madame Walker Theatre where Thomas still gives tours through the week. Ridley-Merriweather recently finished a book, "From The Avenue, a Memoir", written through her fathers eyes. / (Michelle Pemberton/The Star)

For a guy who turns 90 Sunday, Thomas Howard Ridley Jr. sure doesn't look his age, much less act like it.

Spry. Loquacious. Meticulously dressed. The long-time resident of Ransom Place exudes calmness about the ups and downs of life. But most people know him for his extraordinary memory.

A few times a week for the past seven years, Ridley has led tours of the Madame Walker Theatre, a few blocks from his latest home in the neighborhood in the northwest corner of Downtown. He regales visitors with tales of Indiana Avenue in its heyday as the epicenter of black culture. He talks about the shows he watched at the theater as a teenager, of the music that bands played there, of the shops that once stood on every corner for 10 blocks.

"On the tours that I do, people always say, 'Tom, you need to write this down so that people know about it later,'" he said. "I said, 'One day, I will.'"

That day came late last month.

With the help of his daughter, Kathi Ridley-Merriweather, he published "From the Avenue: A Memoir." The book, available on Amazon.com, was almost five years in the making.

Sometimes Ridley and his now late wife, Mary Louise, talked and Kathi typed. Other times, Ridley dredged up memories from his youth and scribbled them down, often in the middle of the night, in a black, leather-bound book.

"From the Avenue" isn't the first book about Indiana Avenue. It also isn't the most comprehensive or objective look at the changes in the storied district.

But for someone like me, a black woman who didn't grow up in Indianapolis, it's nice to hear the tales of the avenue from someone who lived and had fun there for decades. Because in the seven years I've lived here, most of what I've heard can be described only as deep-seated rage about what happened to life on the avenue. I've been to community meetings where residents -- black people not nearly as old as Ridley -- fume that "the city killed Indiana Avenue."

"The history of the avenue is always in danger of being forgotten," I mused to Ridley, while sitting in his kitchen.

He nodded: "That was one of the reasons I wrote this book."

Ridley remembers going to three or four theaters besides the Walker, dancing at clubs post-Prohibition and spending money at shops that catered almost exclusively to blacks.

And he remembers when Lockfield Gardens, one of the first federally financed housing projects in the country, opened. He and his brother helped move some of the first tenants into apartments there.

"It was such a beautiful place that a lot of us hung out there," Ridley said. "It was the place to go because it had this big park in the middle." He was a teenager then.

The death of Indiana Avenue came in stages.

Federal laws that forced integration dealt the first blow. Blacks who came to the avenue mainly to shop and for entertainment suddenly had more options.

"People were going to different sections of town," Ridley said. "People were already living in these areas, but they never went to the businesses too much until then."

As businesses began to fail and people started to move out of the neighborhood, the buildings began to crumble.

The final blow, of sorts, came when Indiana University started to move in, buy property and raze empty buildings. The house where Ridley's late wife grew up, for example, was at the corner North Blackford and Michigan streets -- today the site of a parking garage for IUPUI.

But Ridley doesn't blame the university. It's just the ups and downs of life.

"I was at a symposium a couple years ago over at IUPUI, and there were a couple of people who got up and talked about how they'd lost their businesses," he said. "But their business was going anyhow."

Eventually, he and his wife moved to the then-middle-class Brightwood neighborhood to raise their children. They always intended to move back to Ransom Place, though, and did so in 1996. By then, the neighborhood had completely changed. Instead of living within walking distance of dozens of local businesses selling hats and shoes to black clientele, he now lives within walking distance of Taco Bell and Marco's Pizza selling lunch to college students.

"I was disappointed that there wasn't a movement to help save some of it," he said. "I know most of it was going down, but there was some of it that could've been saved."

So today, in hosting tours at the Walker Theatre and publishing a book, Ridley is doing what he can to save a part of Indiana Avenue. The rest, he says, fitting with his philosophy on all things in life, will take care of itself.

"Some things you just can't change. I can't change the fact that my wife, who I was married to for 62 years, came down with Alzheimer's in the last couple of years. I couldn't do anything about it. We tried."

But you can't worry about those things in life," he said. "You change what you can."